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Professor Jenne' Rodey Andrews, M.F.A., is a highly regarded American poet, critic and memoirist. Recent work has appeared in former Autumn House Publisher Michael Simms' Vox Populi (over fifteen poems) The Passionate Transitory, Belletrist Coterie, The Adirondack Review and elsewhere.

Andrews' current ms of poetry Beautiful Dust was a finalist for the 2014 Autumn House and she recently withdrew the work from Salmon Ltd, Ireland to protest unmoderated bashing of American writers by Irish writers on the press's social media pages.

Her most recent collection, Blackbirds Dance in the Empire of Love, lauded by Robert Bly and endorsed by poets Jim Moore, Dawn Potter and Patricia Kirkpatrick, appeared from Finishing Line Press 2013. A booklength collection Beautiful Dust was 2014 finalist for the Autumn House Press Poetry Prize and solicited by Salmon Press, Ireland. Turning on work set in the West and her native Southwest the collection is under submission to 2019 publication prizes.

Andrews is currently hard at work on two new memoirs: The Shame Garden: A Woman Writes of Isolation, Despair and Self-Redemption, which in intensely wrought and imagistic prose poetry chronicles the anatomy of shame; it is the poet's late-in-life tour d'force, sending the reader through Dante's circles of hell, the sewers of Paris ala Les Mis, mano a mano confrontations with the Alien mater familias, fusing literary and vintage cinematic works in an elliptical dance with human history and experience of being Other. The poet has no idea of what will become of this work but hopes it finds a home as memoir with a small press.

A four part interview with Andrews went live at poet Maureen Doallas's blog Writing without Paper in 2010.

Other collections include the full-length Reunion, Lynx House Press, The Dark Animal of Liberty, Leaping Mountain Press, and In Pursuit of the Family, edited and published by Robert Bly and the Minnesota Writers Publishing House.

Her work has been anthologized in Heartland II, Northern Illinois University Press, 25 Minnesota Vols. I and II, Wingbone: An Anthology of Colorado Poetry, Women Poets of the Twin Cities, Oil and Water and Other Things that Don't Mix, and elsewhere.

Essays have appeared in MPR's Magazine, The Colorado Review, The Twin Falls Times News, and miscellaneous journals.

IIt is Prof. Andrews' belief that one's collection of poetry must be judged on the quality of its craft, voice, and language, not its themes.


With Mr. Bly the memoirist Patricia Hampl wrote a forward to her first collection and is considered the "mother" of the modern American memoir although she arguably shares this title with Mary Karr for Karr's The Liar's Club. Andrews mentored Karr in Minneapolis when the former was circa 19.

Professor Andrews has had an illustrious teaching career at Colorado State University and the University of Colorado where she taught prelaw students in the making of argument and the issues-oriented seminar The American West. She was the highest rated instructor in the University Writing program during her tenure at Boulder.

Currently Professor Andrews writes daily at age 70, having been rendered housebound in 2007 in a fall from a horse, at home with her lover and companion of thirty years the fiction writer Jack Brooks, ten new poems a month, and is working on an additional memoir about her pioneer roots, "Territory Fever: The Story of an Albuquerque Family," posted as chapters are finished to Loquaciously Yours where the poet has produced over 450 essays in the past decade on a variety of topics as well as book reviews. Upcoming: a review of Ethna McKiernan's new Salmon Collection.

Ms. Andrews is also a Civil Rights Advocate advocating in 2019 for the civil rights of the poet Ping Wang who recently won the AWP Award for Memoir.

In 2015, after a long battle, Andrews extracted her MFA in Creative Writing/Poetry from Colorado State University, begun and finished in the 80's, self-advocating under the Americans with Disabilities Act. In fact Andrews was instrumental in the Colorado Commission on Higher Education's approval of the MFA at CSU.

She is a literary fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts, the Minnesota Arts Board Fellowship, was short-listed for a Bush Foundation Fellowship, and was full-time Poet in Residence for the St. Paul Schools from '74-78.

She lived in St. Paul from 1971-78 during the first wave of the Twin Cities literary renaissance, one of the first poets to inaugurate The Loft Literary Center, co-founding Women Poets of the Twin Cities which as noted boosted the careers of Mary Karr, Ethna McKiernan and others, and spent the summer of 1973 in Reggio Calabria, Italy which gave rise to the "voluptuous prose-poetry" memoir Nightfall in Verona posted in entirety here, designated by arts maven and former friend Caroline Marshall of NPR The Writer Reads as "fabulous."

Circa 2010 Andrews also founded a poetry group on She Writes which included Dawn Potter, Katha Pollock and other noteworthy writers, and supported the work of Meg Waite Clayton, fiction writer in addition to mentoring a number of other up and coming writers.

There is no way to estimate the influence on the lives and work of the some 12,000 students k-12 she met and encouraged in the seventies, but the poet James Tolan has attributed his career to her work as it was anthologized in Heartland II, Lucien Stryk, Editor. Professor Stryk read the title poem of In Pursuit of the Family on NPR.

As noted the poet lives in northern Colorado's Poudre River Valley with her husband, fiction writer Jack Brooks; the couple's daily life is centered around writing and enjoying their beautiful imported Golden Retrievers;-- see the Ardorgold website for details. Contact: jenneandrews2010@gmail.com.

Signed copies of the Blackbirds Dance collection, endorsed by James Moore, Patricia Kirkpatrick and Dawn Potter, are available from the poet. She posts new work below and is available for mentorship and virtual readings via Skype.

She is happy to critique ms. of poetry, fiction and memoir for a small fee.

Sunday, May 26, 2013

New Poem: Carbon-Dating, for Magpie Tales and Beyond...



Ponytail - by Last Exit


Carbon-Dating

"Everywhere...the stench of the informer."

Vladimir Lenin

When certain fields are burned
plumes from the chaff ascend,
writing across the sky--
oh brave loquacity of smoke.  
The stories it would tell:

of the woman painter in Mexico, sitting up
at the moment of her own cremation;
of the terrible folly of the perpetrators:
the ethereal vapor climbing
with its aching cargo of souls.

The fields remember this
even after Auschwitz or
the burning of the bodies
during the pogrom at Kiev.

Once a violinist went to Dachau
to serenade its ghosts.  He walked quietly
through the showers and out
to the gardens flourishing from
the calcium infusing the roots.
He had chosen a Bach partita; he wept
as he played. 

Now memorial lilies flay afternoon light;
they have opened like white wounds,
bells mutely warning of incoming
hostile fire,
grey metastatic nodes in the center;
their scent is like smoke,
with its poetry of sorrows.

ii

The earth remembers
and narrates with her rising 
clouds of ash, its filigree of wisps
on cold wide fields of gray sky.  
Limpid clouds
too aggrieved to rain.  
A translucent atmosphere
that hates being breathed in
and out again.

We clasp hands
in the comforting dark
of our lair.  Mist
rises from our skin
damp from making love.

The flames of ardor
die back to ash;
the smoke of desire and the smoke
of atrocity wind together
like filmy hands with white
wrists, a braiding of the terrible
with the holy. 

Great flocks of tundra swans
see the burning of the fields:
they flee the acrid air,
soaring until they are pinpricks,
unrecognizable--a contrail of absence--

until everything the heart
cannot bear has forgotten
what it was.














copyright Jenne' R. Andrews 2013

To participate in The Mag, a weekly writing meme hosted by the lovely Tess Kincaid, click here.  





8 comments:

Audrey Howitt aka Divalounger said...

Your work is wonderful--poignant and vivid

The Write Girl said...

Oh the wonder, pain, and sorrow you see in black smoke. I enjoyed your imagery and beautiful storytelling taking us back through history into the present.

Anonymous said...

This is one of the most beautiful poems I have ever read, deeply effecting work.

Berowne said...

The loquacity of smoke - terrific.

Maureen said...

I read this when you first posted it yesterday and re-read it again just now. It is lyric narrative poetry at its best. It's impossible to read it without feeling the words and being moved by the images that so powerfully speak to that "contrail of absence". I'm especially drawn to the last stanza in the first section of the poem and to the beautiful concluding tercet.

Timoteo said...

"the smoke of desire and the smoke of atrocity wind together..."

Bullseye...as certain traditions would say that atrocity rises from desire.

I love this, you mad genius! And I like that you have modified the background color on the blog--much easier to decipher now.

Ann Grenier said...

An amazing response to the prompt, Jenne. So many lines that draw the reader in to the atmosphere you create, especially in part i. So enjoyable to read your poetry as always.

Tess Kincaid said...

Beautiful...powerful...and so very timely for Memorial weekend...